The invention is a passive safety device integrated into the body of, a vehicle to protect occupants inside the vehicle from penetration of the wheels of the vehicle into the inside of the vehicle upon a collision with another vehicle or with an obstacle. The technical field of the invention is the manufacture of automotive vehicles.
More than 50% of the occupants of automobiles who are injured or killed in highway accidents experienced frontal impacts. In each case, that is to say, the front part of the vehicle encountered an obstacle and was crushed against it. As a result, the front parts of modern vehicles are designed to deform so as to absorb the kinetic energy of such impacts.
However, the great majority of such impacts do not involve the entire front parts of the vehicles but only a portion thereof. These off-center impacts are the most dangerous since only a portion of the energy-absorbing deformable parts are involved in the collision. As a result, deformation reaches the insides of the occupant-holding front compartments of the vehicles. It is in these cases, which are the most common statistically, accounting for more than 70% of front collisions, that the wheels of the vehicles play an aggravating role in the consequences of the collisions.
The rims of the wheels, which are designed to withstand the considerable forces of normal use, are practically non-deformable and at the time of such an impact break into the inside of the vehicle where the occupants are located. This is true of the front wheels, which generally injure the lower limbs of the occupants seated in the front of the vehicle, but it is true also of the rear wheels and, when it is placed horizontally in the rear trunk or front compartment of the vehicle, the spare wheel.
The penetration of the wheels into the inside of the vehicle also weakens its rigidity, which is already relatively slight. This worsens the deformations due to the impact.
The consequences of this penetration of the wheels are rarely directly fatal but a very large number of accidents would be less serious if it could be avoided.
Automobile manufacturers, conscious of this danger, provide various solutions. For example, Renault reinforces with a bracket the path the wheels might take and Mercedes Benz protects the feet of the driver with a sort of shell of rigid foam placed in the lining of the floor to reduce the forces due to deformation of the latter.
However, these solutions are ineffective when the energy of the impact is high.